Discovery Taps Total Immersion to Develop Augmented Reality Game for "Deadliest Catch"

Augmented reality specialist, Total Immersion, contacted [itvt] Tuesday to let us know that it has been tapped by the Discovery Channel and the latter's media agency, PHD, to develop an interactive augmented reality game to promote the sixth season of the action-documentary series, "Deadliest Catch" (note: the series, whose season premiere aired on April 13th, follows the trials and tribulations of Alaskan crab fishermen in the Berings Sea). A demo video of the so-called "Deadliest Catch Big Catch 3D Game" is embedded above.

The game, which is activated when users hold up to their Webcam a print-out or print ad for the show that contains a special trigger, challenges them to navigate a fishing boat through treacherous seas in order to catch crab pots: they manipulate their boat--which like other elements of the game appears as a quasi-3D animation--by moving around the print ad or print-out.

Discovery and PHD have developed a cross-platform media strategy to promote the new game. The strategy's first phase, which was executed during the last week of March, saw the game distributed across Facebook and "Deadliest Catch" fan sites. The second phase, which began April 1st, is slated to last through the end of the month and sees the game promoted via print ads in ESPN, Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone, People, Entertainment Weekly, and Men's Journal; via "click-to-print" promotions on ESPN.com, MSN.com and TVguide.com, as well as through custom email blasts targeting publications' subscriber databases; via in-program mentions and digital overlays during broadcasts of the new season of "Deadliest Catch" and of past-season reruns; and via "experiential" promotions that include 1) large digital screens that have been mounted on the sides of "mobile video trucks" designed by All Points Media; and 2) brand ambassadors who conduct street events at which consumers are invited to play the game.

In other augmented reality news: Santiago Alfaro, a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab, has developed a technology called Surround Vision that allows viewers to use their smartphone's camera screen to extend the video component of the program they are watching beyond the limits of the TV screen (much as technologies like Surround Sound transform a movie's audio into a 360-degree experience)--in other words, enabling them to see things that are taking place "off screen." Thus, Larry Hardesty of MIT's News Office explains in an article on the new technology, "if a viewer wanted to see what was happening off the left edge of the television screen, she could simply point her cell phone in that direction, and an image would pop up on its screen. The technology could also allow a guest at a Super Bowl party, for instance, to consult several different camera angles on a particular play, without affecting what the other guests see on the TV screen."

According to Alfaro, if the technology were commercialized, the video playing on the smartphone would be delivered over the Internet, and the smartphone would use its built-in camera to determine its orientation towards the TV and the selected channel, possible taking its cue from the channel ident/bug at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen.

According to Hardesty's article, the MIT Media Lab is planning a series of "user studies" of the new technology in the spring and summer that will use content from a number of partners. "We're looking at sports; we're looking at children's programming, both live action and cartoons; we're looking at, let's say, ordinary entertainment programs, as well as programs shot in a studio like talk shows," Michael Bove, the MIT Media Lab researcher under whose supervision Alfaro developed Surround Vision, told Hardesty. "And we hope to have examples of several of these fairly soon. There are also one or two other things that defy categorization right now, that you sort of have to see in order to understand what they are." According to Hardesty, Boston public television station, WGBH, is likely to participate in the user studies.

A demo video of Surround Vision is also embedded above.